Aug 2

Aug 2 When Humility Stops Hiding

Church History, Faith, Formation, Identity, Leadership, Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Life

I read something recently about women in leadership that said, in essence, women have too much to offer to enter a room apologizing or leave one apologizing for having been there.

Oof. I felt that all the way to my core.

When you’re born among people deeply rooted in the South, you can learn very early that a good girl is seen more than she is heard. Being opinionated is not ladylike. Taking up too much room is prideful. Quiet equals humility, and humility often looks suspiciously like staying out of everyone’s way.

In the world where I grew up, hiding could be mistaken for holiness.

I’ll take ‘Lies we grew up with for $1000, Alex!’

It has taken me a long time to understand that humility doesn’t require anyone, especially a woman, to erase herself. It doesn’t ask us to deny the gifts God placed within us or keep our voices permanently lowered so no one can accuse us of wanting too much influence. Sometimes humility listens, waits, and refuses to make itself the center. And, sometimes, humility opens its mouth. Sometimes humility steps into the room, takes the seat God has provided, and speaks because obedience matters more than appearing appropriately small and ‘lady-like.’ (FYI – you can speak with humility, make a point, and still be lady-like.)

Catherine of Siena seems like a fitting companion for that part of becoming.

She was a woman who wasn’t supposed to have that much influence. Catherine was born in Siena, Italy, in 1347, the daughter of a cloth dyer and one child in an enormous family. She had little formal education, no wealth or official church authority, and none of the credentials we’d expect from someone who would eventually advise priests, political leaders, bishops, and popes.

Her family expected her to marry. Catherine believed God was calling her to a different kind of life.

Around sixteen, she became part of the Mantellate, a community of Dominican laywomen. That meant these women weren’t cloistered nuns living behind convent walls. Catherine remained in her family home and devoted herself to prayer, simplicity, service, and care for people who were sick or poor. Her early spiritual life included long stretches of solitude and prayer.

But prayer didn’t leave Catherine hidden. It sent her outward.

She began caring for the sick, helping people reconcile fractured relationships, counseling those who came to her, and gathering a wonderfully varied community around herself. Although Catherine was still young, many began calling her “Mamma” because she prayed for them, cared for them, corrected them, and took their formation seriously.

That kind of spiritual motherhood had nothing to do with age or biology. It was the work of helping people become more fully alive to God.

She lived during a chaotic period for both Italy and the Church. Cities fought with cities. Political loyalties shifted. Violence was common. Church leadership was troubled by corruption, division, and the long absence of the papacy from Rome while the popes resided in Avignon, France.

Into that turmoil walked a young laywoman with little schooling and a startling amount of courage.

Catherine dictated letter after letter to an astonishing range of people. Nearly four hundred of those letters have survived. She wrote to kings, queens, mercenaries (can you imagine!?), clergy, civic leaders, friends, people in grief, people in sin, people with influence, and people who were wasting it. She could be tender and nurturing, but she could also be extraordinarily direct. Her words carried the basic message, “I love you, I believe God has called you to more than this, and I’m not going to help you hide from what needs to change.”

Her advocacy was one influence among several urging Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome. It would be too tidy to say Catherine single-handedly brought the pope home, but it would also be a mistake to pretend her voice didn’t matter. She loved the Church deeply, and that love made her unwilling to ignore its wounds. Catherine didn’t stand at a distance throwing rocks at the Church. She spoke as someone who belonged to it and longed for it to become more faithful. Her loyalty wasn’t passive, and her humility wasn’t silent agreement. She could honor a leader’s calling while urgently telling him to live like he had one.

We often assume love requires us to protect people and institutions from hard truth. Catherine reminds us that love sometimes does the opposite. Love refuses to flatter someone into spiritual ruin.

One of the most familiar lines attributed to Catherine is, “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”

It’s a beautiful line, but it might be a modern polishing of something she actually wrote to Stefano Maconi: “If you are what you ought to be, you will set fire to all Italy, and not only yonder.”

Honestly, the original might be even better.

Catherine wasn’t encouraging vague self-expression or telling us to discover our most authentic personal brand. She was calling a fellow believer to become what faithful surrender required of him. The fire was a life so surrendered to God that it changed the places it touched. Being who God means for us to be isn’t about becoming louder than everyone else. It’s about becoming less divided within ourselves. It’s allowing the person God created, gifted, redeemed, and called to stop fighting against His invitation.

That is where Catherine’s life meets mine.

I’ve always been a person with big, deep feelings. I don’t know whether I was born with that bent in my personality tree or whether it was formed along the way. I suspect it was both, though I’m certain my parents’ divorce when I was three made me pay close attention to rooms, relationships, and all the feelings people weren’t saying out loud.

For a long time, I didn’t have language for much of what I carried in my heart and mind. Then I landed in Mr. Merle McPheeters’s sophomore Advanced English class. Every paper he assigned invited personal reflection. One assignment came when we finished reading Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and the question was enormous:

Is man basically good or basically evil?

Whoa. (Another FYI – I am pretty certain Mr. McPheeters was a believer)

I can still point to that paper as the place where my feelings began finding words. And yes, because I’m apparently an archivist of my own becoming, I still have all of my high school papers.

That paper gave me a glimpse of something I wouldn’t fully embrace for MANY years. My inner world wasn’t something I needed to apologize for. My ability to notice, feel, connect ideas, and wrestle with what was happening beneath the surface could become a way of serving other people. Thoughtful words could be action. A voice didn’t have to be harsh to carry power. Humility could speak.

I’m only just beginning to understand that in its fullness.

I want to be humble. Truly.

Micah 6:8 feels like it could be the verse for this season of my life: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” God has shown us what is good. But walking humbly with God isn’t the same as disappearing in front of people.

Biblical humility tells the truth about who God is and who we are. It refuses to make us the center of the story, but it also refuses to call God a liar about what He has made, given, and invited. Humility doesn’t say, “I have nothing to offer.” Humility says, “Whatever I have came from God, belongs to God, and should be used in love for the good of others.”

Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10:

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.”

That doesn’t sound like an invitation to spend our lives denying the workmanship or avoiding the work.

Peter says each person has received a gift and should use it to serve others as a faithful steward of God’s grace. Those who speak and those who serve are to depend on what God supplies so that He receives the glory through Jesus Christ. That is humility with hands and feet. It speaks. It serves. It remembers where the gift came from. It refuses to hoard grace under the respectable-sounding excuse of not wanting to draw attention.

I’m learning when I need to speak, when I need to hold back long enough to listen and gain clarity, and when I need to move headlong into the fray. I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I speak too soon. Sometimes I rehearse a sentence for so long that the moment to say it packs a lunch and leaves without me.

This is still a learning curve.

But, as a woman in leadership, I feel deeply that those of us who’ve been given places of influence, wherever those places might be, have a responsibility to use our voices to open doors and lay foundations for the women coming behind us. We can learn to be curious, ask better questions, and teach the people around us to do the same. We can challenge unhealthy patterns (in others AND in ourselves) without losing tenderness. We can love the Church without pretending everything done in its name has been good or faithful.

We can stop apologizing for sitting at a table God Himself has set.

For decades, I heard versions of “girls don’t belong here.” I absorbed the idea that men were allowed to decide which spiritual gifts God gave women and how quietly women should use them. The religious version of “the He-Man-Woman-Haters Club.” Those voices don’t simply disappear because I now understand them differently. Old messages can be stubborn tenants. They keep rattling around long after their lease has expired.

But I can look back at the conversations, circumstances, and places I’ve been invited to speak into over the last several years, especially over the last few months, and finally recognize what has been there all along.

Oh…God has given me this passion.
Wow…God has given me this voice.
God has given me this particular nudge toward questions, formation, justice, compassion, leadership, and care.

And He really is using it.

Recognizing that doesn’t have to make me proud. It can make me grateful, more careful with the gift, more dependent on the Spirit, more willing to receive correction, and more committed to using whatever influence I have for the good of others.

There is no human gatekeeper who gets the final word on an invitation issued by the Lord God Himself. When He invites us to use what He has given, we can embrace the gift and still walk humbly. We can take our seat without climbing onto the table. We can speak without needing to dominate. We can lead without pretending we are the source of our own wisdom. We can be both confident and teachable, courageous and kind, clear and curious.

Catherine’s life doesn’t give us permission to assume every strong feeling is a word from God. Her story should send us deeper into prayer, Scripture, community, discernment, and accountability. But it also challenges the lie that faithful women must be invisible women.

Humility is not self-erasure.

Sometimes humility means receiving the voice God gave us and using it in obedience. God isn’t calling you to become less yourself. He is calling you to become more fully surrendered.

There is a difference.

Surrender lets God refine our motives, redirect our desires, correct our blind spots, and use our gifts in ways that serve rather than perform. Shrinking buries those gifts and hopes fear will be mistaken for faithfulness.

Sometimes what looks like modesty is actually fear dressed in religious language.

Sometimes the obedient step is to listen, study, apologize, wait, or make room for another voice. But sometimes the obedient step is to stop rehearsing why you aren’t qualified and begin tending the work God keeps placing in front of you.

Catherine went deeply inward with God, and what she found there carried her boldly outward. She prayed, cared for bodies, formed souls, made peace, wrote letters, challenged leaders, and loved the Church enough to expect more from it. Her Dialogue, letters, and prayers became so significant that in 1970 she was named a Doctor of the Church, one of the Church’s most influential teachers.

A woman with little education and no official title became a teacher of the Church.

Maybe that is one more reminder that God has never been as impressed by our gatekeeping systems as we are.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether we’re allowed to become who God has called us to be. Perhaps the question is whether we’ll keep confusing fear with humility or finally trust that the God who formed us also knows what He intends to do through us.

Consider finishing these sentences: